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English health minister Lord Warner has reacted to TheBigOptOut.org, a campaign that mobilises citizens to opt out from a proposed national medical database. He is offering patients an opt-out from one part of the new system - a synopsis for emergency care, which contains things like your prescriptions and whether you are diabetic. He is not offering an easy opt-out from the full database. The plan is to upload data from family doctors and hospitals over the next year or two, to regional hosting centres. Custody of the data will then pass from doctors to the Chief Medical Officer, a government official.

The campaign is now focussed on persuading people to forbid their doctors from uploading the data in the first place. A November poll showed that most general practitioners would not upload data without patient consent; another showed that a majority of patients did not approve of a compulsory central database.